That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam

A viral Reddit confessional about a “major food delivery app” posted January 2nd is most likely AI-generated. The original post by user Trowaway_whistleblow alleged that an unnamed food delivery company regularly delays customer orders, calls couriers “human assets,” and exploits their “desperation” for cash, among other indefensible actions. Nearly 90,000 upvotes and four days later, it’s become increasingly clear that the post’s text is probably AI-generated.

Considering the delivery app industry’s track record of exploitation of its drivers, it’s easy to see why so many people believed this was the real thing.

The Verge put the original 586-word Reddit post through several free online AI detectors, in addition to Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The results were mixed: Copyleaks, GPTZero, Pangram, Gemini, and Claude all pegged it as likely AI-generated, but ZeroGPT and QuillBot both reported it as human-written. ChatGPT played it down the middle.

Reached by The Verge on Signal, Trowaway_whistleblow provided an image of a supposed Uber Eats employee badge. Casey Newton of Platformer and Hard Fork also reported receiving the badge photo and noted that Gemini flagged it as AI.

Using Google Gemini to check the image they sent us, it confirmed that “Based on a digital watermark analysis, most or all of this image was edited or generated with Google AI.” The digital watermark check for images that was added to Gemini in November looks for Google’s SynthID watermark, an “imperceptible” tag attached to content generated by its AI tools.

Hard Reset, a Substack publication, reported that Trowaway_whistleblow gave reporter Alex Shultz a purportedly internal Uber document — but quickly deleted their Signal account once Shultz began pressing about the authenticity of the document. The Verge’s chat with Trowaway_whistleblow shows a message saying “This person isn’t using Signal.”

Uber denies the content of the Reddit post and the employee badge photo. “Not only are the claims fake, but they’re also dead wrong,” Uber spokesperson Noah Edwardsen told The Verge. Uber Eats’ Andrew Macdonald wrote on X, “This post is definitively not about us. I suspect it is completely made up. Don’t trust everything you read on the internet.”

And DoorDash CEO Tony Xu also denied the redditor’s “appalling” allegations in a post on X. “This is not DoorDash, and I would fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post,” Xu wrote.

Correction, January 5th: An earlier version of this post cited Gemini’s text response about the content of the employee badge image as evidence that it was AI-generated. The Gemini tool was used to check for the presence of a SynthID watermark, which it found, indicating that it was edited or generated by Google AI.